My core beliefs about how humans work, along with curated and loosely structured sources and useful frameworks/ideas. The stuff I've forwarded to people often enough that it became necessary to build this page.
Click a claim to see which sources support it. Scroll the rings to explore more.
Your mind — the part that is conscious and uses language — is a part of you, not the whole.
Your feelings are your responsibility. No one is making you feel anything.
All behaviours and feelings have positive purpose.
Asking a part what it wants, then what it wants from that, until it bottoms out in a state rather than an outcome.
Feelings carry information. They point at something your mind is not attending to.
Getting a word or image to fit a bodily felt sense, and waiting for it to shift. The root technique for most of this list.
Feeling is something you are doing. On some level you are choosing it.
You are also choosing not to feel the good things — safe, loved, alright.
It is never about what caused a feeling. It is about what the feeling is for. All behaviour looks forward.
Adlerian psychology as a dialogue. The source of most of the "what is it for, not what caused it" framing above.
A taxonomy of the specific manoeuvres a mind uses to keep a goal safely out of reach.
A sequence deriving "psychological problems" from the constraints any sense-making creature is under. Read in order — it builds.
Contents page for a book-length treatise. Start at the top and follow the numbering.
High-energy states as the moments a brain can re-settle into a new configuration. Speculative, and load-bearing for a lot of the rest.
The Enneagram treated as a theory of what each type is defending against, rather than a personality quiz. Opening post of a longer sequence.
The six realms as recognisable modes of being stuck, with practices for each.
Six parts on working hard at something you care about without running the engine on shame. The table of contents lives on replacingguilt.com; the essays themselves are on mindingourway.com.
Motivation as a budget you can overdraw, and burnout as the account being frozen for a reason.
Adlerian psychology as a dialogue. The source of most of the "what is it for, not what caused it" framing above.
A taxonomy of the specific manoeuvres a mind uses to keep a goal safely out of reach.
Getting a word or image to fit a bodily felt sense, and waiting for it to shift. The root technique for most of this list.
Asking a part what it wants, then what it wants from that, until it bottoms out in a state rather than an outcome.
Nonviolent Communication with the reasoning shown, so it doesn't come out as a script.
What the core terms were probably pointing at before they became English abstractions.
Diagnostic — which of the four is missing when practice stalls.
Conduct, concentration and insight as three legs that have to grow together.
Memory reconsolidation — the mechanism by which a schema can actually be overwritten rather than argued with.
Useful immunisation against everything else on this page.